


guilt

by myrosebudboy



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 05:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8132848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrosebudboy/pseuds/myrosebudboy
Summary: alternately titled: falling out of love is a very painful thing





	

**Author's Note:**

> based on this excerpt from Fangirl (Simon Snow and the Seventh Oak):
> 
>  
> 
> Agatha wrung her fingers in her cape miserably. (But still prettily. Even Agatha’s tear-stained face was a thing of beauty.) Simon wanted to tell her it was all right, to forget the whole scene with Baz in the forest.… Agatha standing in the moonlight, holding both of Baz’s pale hands in her own …
> 
> “Just tell me,” Simon said, his voice shaking.
> 
> “I don’t know what to say,” she wept. “There’s you. And you’re good. And you’re right. And then there’s him.… And he’s different.”
> 
> “He’s a monster.” Simon clenched his square jaw.
> 
> Agatha just nodded. “Perhaps.”

They’re fourteen when he tells her he likes her. They’re fourteen when she tells him that she likes him, too. They’re fourteen and the late afternoon sunlight is streaming across the grounds and he’s looking at her like she’s the only person in the universe and she thinks this, this is it.

And she believes it for two weeks, three months, a year. He smiles at her at breakfast and waits to walk her to class. He’s endearingly awkward and cracks just the right jokes to make her smile. He offers to carry her books for her and tells her she’s beautiful in the most matter-of-fact tone possible. He tells her he can see a future with her. She tells him, so can she.

They plan, sometimes, because Agatha is paranoid and Simon willingly accedes to her requests. What they’ll do after they leave Watford, where they’ll live, how they’ll survive.

(Perhaps planning ten years ahead is a bit much, but Agatha doesn’t care.)

He intertwines his fingers with hers, and she laughs, eyes shining with all the hope they have inside.

-

It’s a year, five months and two days when she starts to panic. Something in her suddenly locks in place and it’s four in the morning and all she can think about is the realisation that she will have Simon Snow with her for the rest of her life. She’s fifteen and he will be with her until she is seventy-five and she’ll never know what it’s like to live a life without having him at her side.

She should feel peace, shouldn’t she? Happiness to have a fairytale ending? Finding her true love so soon, locking down her prince, never worrying about relationships ever again? Isn’t that what she’s always wanted?

And isn’t Simon everything she’s always wanted?

Then why does she feel like she doesn’t want it?

Agatha, you’re tired and you’re not thinking straight right now. Go to bed.

(Her alarm goes off at six-thirty. She’s already awake.)

-

They’re back from the holidays and she stumbles across Simon in her trek back from the dining hall. He calls her name and she waits for him to catch up, hoping, praying, for any sort of butterflies, any stomach flips, anything. She’ll take anything.

He reaches her, and takes her hand, and she feels nothing at all.

“I missed you,” he says, face lit up.

She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out, so she just kisses his cheek instead.

-

Simon drops into the seat beside her in the dining hall, grinning. “Hey.”

She smiles. “Hey. How was your day?”

“Pretty good. I still think Miss Possibelf has a grudge against me.”

Agatha props her chin on her hand, asks the routine question. “What’d she do?”

“The usual scowling and ‘Simon’,” he jokingly mimics, and Agatha laughs.

“She’ll get over it.”

He turns to face her better. “Hopefully.”

Like clockwork, she thinks. She tries to remember the last time they’ve had a different conversation. She can’t.

-

Penelope Bunce seeks her out before breakfast on a Saturday morning, pulls her into an empty classroom, eyes hard, jaw set.

“Stop this insanity, Agatha.”

Agatha averts her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

_(I know exactly what you’re talking about.)_

Penelope shakes her a little harshly. “Snap out of it, Wellbelove. It’s not doing either of you any good.”

Agatha’s eyes refuse to meet hers. “I know.”

-

Two years, four months and nine days later, Agatha Wellbelove asks Baz Pitch to go with her into the Wavering Wood. Two years, four months and nine days later, Agatha Wellbelove is fully aware of Simon Snow standing fifteen metres to her right, hidden in the trees. Two years, four months and nine days later, Agatha Wellbelove finally turns her mother’s whispered advice of how to twist perspectives of situations into exactly how she wants them to be seen, of how she takes exactly two steps towards Baz Pitch and looks into his eyes, of how she hears a muffled gap exactly fifteen metres to her right.

Two years, four months and nine days later, Agatha Wellbelove feels a sharp stab in her stomach as she breaks Simon Snow’s heart.


End file.
